When I was in New York about two months ago, the controversy over Cordoba House, the mosque being built near the site where the World Trade Center once stood, was just getting going. I remember seeing conserative blogger Pamela Geller on Mick Huckabee's Fox News show (when in the US I watch Fox News compulsively) calling the project, which is designed to promote cross-cultural understanding, as a desecration of the memory of those who died on 9/11. As Geller engaged in tarnishing an entire religion (what else can it be called?) and Huckabee politely nodded, I wondered how mainstream this stupidity had become.

A couple of days ago the prominent Republican Newt Gingrich — often said to be one of the smartest guys in his party — joined Geller's campaign. Gingrich wrote:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

The proposed "Cordoba House" overlooking the World Trade Center site – where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks - is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites. For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.

Gingrich is clearly actually a moron, on at least two counts. First, why does he want the US to follow the same policies as Saudi Arabia? Is that the standard he sets for the country? When will Freedom House condemn this dangerous voice against freedom of religion?

Secondly — and this is pretty galling from a historian — the Cordoba mosque was built on the site of a Spanish Visigoth church, but only after it had been a place of worship for both Christians and Muslims, and Emir Abdel Rahman actually bought the property and then began building what is generally recognized as one of the most beautiful buildings on the planet. It was after the Reconquistada, along which came the Inquisition that drove Jew and Muslim from Spain, that the building was converted into a church and its interior symmetry ruined by the construction of a huge, and ugly, Baroque wooden chapel inside it.

Geller and her friends like to describe the Cordoba House project as "the Islamic supremacist mosque", which reminds me of another supremacist project Geller has no problem with: Israel. It's amazing, and I'm sure no coincidence, the overlap you get between anti-Muslim fanatics and those who support Israel's wars and land grabs. Geller notably once ranted:

Israel is essential. And I pray dearly that in the ungodly event that Tehran or its jihadi proxies (Hez'ballah, Hamas etc) target Israel with a nuke, that she retaliate with everything she has at Tehran, Mecca, and Medina...............

Not to mention Europe. They exterminated all their Jews, but that wasn't enough. Those monsters then went on to import the next generation of Jew killers.

LoonWatch has more of the same. To me it seems clear that Geller and her ilk have embarked on a project to fan Islamophobia because it is convenient for another cause, maintaining US public opinion (already fed years of anti-Arab propaganda) on Israel's side as the legitimacy of the Zionist project erodes globally. They want to carry out this Muslim-bashing for its own sake, of course, but also comes with a nice benefit of boosting Israel, which has long had an interest in spreading anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hysteria. Sooner or later — and I think sooner — these people will start discrediting themselves and the causes they support.

Issandr El Amrani is a Cairo-based writer and consultant. His reporting and commentary on the Middle East and North Africa has appeared in The Economist, London Review of Books, Financial Times, The National, The Guardian, Time and other publications. He also publishes one of the longest-running blog in the region, www.arabist.net.